Steph Curry will hold his UNDERRATED tour for the fourth summer in a row. Launched in 2019, the mini-tournament style tour is presented by Rakuten and developed by the Golden State Warriors’ icon to seek out and elevate high school recruits who are, like he was at that point in his career, not as highly-regarded in the world of basketball recruiting. The ultimate goal of the tour, while functioning as a competition, is to provide a platform to young athletes in hopes that they’ll make inroads into Division I schools
Stretching from late-July into the end of August, this summer’s tour will make stops in Atlanta, Las Vegas, Seattle, and Philadelphia in search of athletes from each city. For each regional stop, 75 girls and boys are selected to participate in the first round, while 30 from each group are invited to return after the second day. Things are eventually pared down to the top eight in each group from each region. From there, they’ll go on to compete in the UNDERRATED Championship Stop in San Francisco, in early 2023.
“From the beginning, the UNDERRATED Tour was created and designed to raise visibility for often-overlooked three-star high school players, like myself, and we continue to evolve the program each year,” Curry said in a release. “Right now, our team is empowered to advance our mission by shedding light on overlooked talents through continuing these regional games, and ultimately the championships.”
One of those talented yet overlooked athletes was Jacobi Sebock, who took part in last summer’s Tour and went on to compete in the UNDERRATED Championships. Sebock, who grew up in a suburb of Oklahoma City, was a sports nut as a kid but got a late start because of several health conditions including a first-degree heart block, asthma, and hypohidrotic ectodermal dysplasia (HED), a condition that can cause a person to be born without sweat glands.
Sebock and his parents figured out how to work with and around his HED symptoms so that he’d be able to follow his dream of being drafted into the NBA, and the UNDERRATED Tour gave him the window to make up for lost time. After the Championship stop, Sebock was named the conference MVP at the end of his high school career and has since committed to Dodge City Community College in Kansas.
For someone who was famously dubbed a 3-star recruit, the program and competitive spirit of the UNDERRATED Tour obviously sits close to Curry’s heart. The day he showed up at the Bay Area Championships this past March saw him just as lit up as the young athletes vying for his insight and working to follow in his footsteps. Whether they’ll one day be on pro teams, competing for titles, or seeing how far basketball can take them in college as a conduit into their adult lives, the UNDERRATED Tour hopes to give young athletes the tools and support to get there.
